Micropub and taproom till: pints, halves and stock

What a micropub needs from a till

A micropub or taproom sells a small number of drinks, mostly by the measure, to a few dozen people at a time. You do not need table service or a kitchen printer. You need fast buttons for a pint, a half and a third, cash and card recorded, and a clear idea of how much of each cask or keg has gone. The free Mini Till covers the first part. The paid stock console, Mini Till Pro, covers the staff and stock part. This guide is honest about where each one stops.

What the free till does and does not do

The free till is a browser-based till for one device. It does these things well for a bar:

Product buttons with a name and a price, in the order you choose.
Cash with change worked out, card, and split payments.
Voiding a sale and an end-of-day total for cash and card.
CSV export of every sale, and a backup of the whole till.
Offline use, because the page and the data live on the device.

It does not do these, and it is better to know before opening night:

No tabs. There is no way to hold a basket open against a customer's name and add to it through the evening. Each round is a sale, paid for at the bar.
No modifiers or sizes on one button. A pint and a half are two separate buttons.
No stock levels. The free till records what you sold, not what is left in the cellar.
No staff sign-in. Sales are not recorded against whoever pulled the pint.
No tips field and no table orders.

If the tab is central to how you trade, a till with open orders will suit you better. If you run a counter where people pay as they order, this works.

Pricing by measure

Draught beer and cider have to be sold in set quantities: a third of a pint, a half, two-thirds of a pint and multiples of a half pint. Source: GOV.UK, weights and measures: specified quantities. Most micropubs sell thirds, halves and pints, and the till is happy with all of them because each measure is just a product.

The problem is the number of buttons. Eight beers in three measures is twenty-four buttons, and the bar gets slow. Two ways round it:

Price in bands, not beers. Keep buttons such as "Pint, session", "Half, session", "Third, session", "Pint, strong" and so on, and let the chalkboard say which beer is in which band. The till records the band and the amount, not the beer, which is fine if you only need to know what the takings were.
One button per beer, for the pint and the half only. Thirds belong to the tasting paddle, so give them a "Tasting third" button at a flat price.

Whatever you choose, work out the price ladder before the evening. A half is normally priced a little above half the pint, because the glass, the cleaning and the time cost the same. Do the sums on your cost per pint, not on a feeling. How to price products shows the margin and mark-up calculation, which works the same way for a pint as for a candle.

Prices in the free till include VAT at 20 per cent, and each sale shows the VAT inside it. It uses a single rate, so if you also sell food at a different rate, talk to your accountant about how to read that figure. What till records HMRC expects covers VAT and the till.

Licensing is separate from the till

The till does not deal with any of this, but it affects whether you can sell at all. In England and Wales, a premises that sells alcohol needs a premises licence, which names a designated premises supervisor who holds a personal licence. Staff who do not hold a personal licence can serve if a personal licence holder has authorised them. For a one-off or temporary event, a Temporary Event Notice can cover up to 499 people and up to 168 hours, and your council will tell you the fee, the notice period and how many you can give in a year. Source: GOV.UK, alcohol licensing. Scotland and Northern Ireland have different systems.

Kegs and casks as stock

A cask or keg is bought as one unit and sold in many, which is the hard thing to track. Here is how it works in the stock console, and what it cannot do.

In Mini Till Pro each product has a cost, a unit label such as pint or bottle, a number per case and a reorder level. A delivery is booked into a central store, moved out to the bar, and counted at a stocktake. The console shows what it expected to find against what you counted, with the difference beside each line. A sale on a till takes one unit off the location that the till is set to.

That means the console counts each product in whole units. It does not turn a half pint into half a unit of the pint product, and it does not convert a cask into pints for you. So the practical split is:

Bottles, cans, crisps and anything sold as it arrives: track them in the console. Book in the case, sell by the unit, and the count adds up.
Cask and keg: book the delivery, then dip or count the remaining pints at a stocktake and compare them against what the takings say you sold. A gap between the two is wastage, dregs, line cleaning or over-pouring, and the variance figure is the prompt to find out which.

A low variance across the month tells you more than any single night. The stock control guide walks through deliveries, transfers, waste and stocktakes screen by screen.

Staff sign-ins and who sold what

On the free till, anyone can use the phone. In Pro, each person has a login and a PIN on a shared device. They tap their name and enter the PIN, then choose the location, and the sales they ring up are recorded against them. There are five roles, from owner down to a view-only role for an accountant. The takings reports show totals per location and per person, and a cash up by location records the float and any over or short.

This matters on a busy night. If the till is regularly £10 short on one person's shift, you want to see that without accusing anyone, and the numbers give you somewhere to start. Pro also keeps working when the signal drops, which is common in cellars and old buildings: sales are saved on the device and sent when the connection returns.

What it costs

The till is free and stays free. Mini Till Pro is £10 a month for a team of up to five people. Teams, with no limit on numbers, is £100 a month. Both start with a 14 day free trial, with nothing charged until day 14, and you can cancel before then. The details are on the pricing page, and there is a demo of the console with four days of trade across three locations, which needs no sign-up. See stock control for several counters for what it covers.

A micropub with one bar and three staff on a rota fits inside Pro. If you have a taproom, a bar and a stall at festivals, each can be its own location with its own count.

Questions

Can the free till run a bar tab?

No. It has no open orders or tabs. Customers pay each round at the bar, or you keep a tab on paper and ring it up when it is settled.

Do I need Pro for one bar?

Not necessarily. If you only want to ring up drinks and cash up, the free till is enough. Pro earns its place when you want stock counts, staff logins and reports.

Does it work in a cellar bar with no signal?

Yes. Once opened, the free till works offline, and Pro queues sales on the device until the connection returns.

A till for a micropub, taproom or small bar